


Darkness covered the Abyss

by Daftinthehead (intravenusann)



Series: Apocaverse [1]
Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Gen, apocaverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-11
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:33:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3243146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intravenusann/pseuds/Daftinthehead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.” Every story has a beginning; every Apocalypse starts somewhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in April 2011.

In the beginning, there was darkness. Whether you believe there were many waters or simply a great nothingness, everything began in darkness. And in the end, darkness will reign again — with fire or water or plague or rot.

When they find it, the darkness is trapped.

No, that isn’t right, darkness is everywhere. Inside human bodies and the burnt out filaments of old light bulbs, all the streetlights and broken atoms cannot make darkness go away.

The Darkness has been trapped.

They find it, because they go looking for it. They’ve turned light into a weapon and the fear of it has been lost. Fire, lightning, and the inner workings of the sun have all been made into cruel and pointed weapons. They’ve become fearless children in their boredom with old toys.

The Darkness was trapped.

And they found it. With their technology, which was its own kind of magic, they carefully opened its cage and placed it in another. But the Darkness had long ago settled into that cage, had long ago seeped into every seam of the obsidian pyramid that housed it. And a new cage was only another thing to own.

The Darkness was never truly trapped at all.

What they do not realize is that everything Darkness touches, Darkness owns.

—-

Subject 1 was introduced to Project Danger in a controlled medium. After twenty-four hours, Subject 1 was irrecoverable. Results inconclusive.

—-

The Darkness is learning a new form. It is not too new, but so different from the first things the Darkness learned about. There were small scurrying things once, and huge hulking beasts. There have been soft-bodied fish with large, bright eyes and rows of needle-teeth.

It has worn human flesh before; found it to be a tolerable fit.

The Darkness has been cascades of fire and ash dripping down mountainsides and ink drilled into blood and skin. It has been open-mouthed caves full of water and treasures and bones and it has been the silence of catacombs.

Yes, this form does just fine.

But the Darkness needs bones to burn against, flesh to tatau itself into, skin to sink into like oil.

It slips into the shadow of a man and creeps along behind him down fluorescent-lit hallways. It leans against a warm brick wall as the man smokes a cigarette. It curls around his feet like a cat, sliding down well-oiled brakes and, for the first time, touching the hot, dark of a combustion engine.

After the sun has fainted below the horizon, the darkness breaks in two with less fanfare than the splitting of cells or atoms. Part of it walks down the street in the body of a man and the other sleeps in the cooling pipes of a Lexus.

—-

Subjects 2 and 3 were introduced to Project Danger in a controlled medium. After twenty-four hours, remains [2.5 L, 120 kg] were recovered to be identified. Positive identification made of Subject 2, Subject 3. Results remain inconclusive.

—-

The form of man is tedious. The Darkness experiments with rats and snakes before finally melting into the shadows that bring a new layer of silence and chill to the streets that night.

Dodging streetlamps like a mugger, Darkness worms its way into bedrooms and shops and the yawning mouths of animals. There are a lot of lights, but there is still enough darkness for it to move freely.

What is it? Who is it? There is something…

Something to be sniffed out like a dog, felt out like blind hands against the cold walls of apartment buildings where the hall lights flicker with age.

—-

The shift of cells against cells is familiar. The imitation of bones and muscles, the electric snap of life, are all within an easy range of imitation. Creeping and settling again in a reshaped world, though, it discovers the joy in lighting the fire that pushes pistons. There is so much darkness in the cold fire of moving electrons. Screens flicker, gases explode behind thick glass until the tubes go dark.

It follows the flow of data, gasoline, blood. Devouring is a way of ownership.

And oh what lovely things man has made in its absence.

——

Heavy curtains on the windows block out the light from passing cars at night and the sun during the day. Seven in the morning rolls around, he barely notices. Dawn is a pair of numbers separated by a colon in the upper corner of his computer screen. It has no meaning for him anymore.

He scratches the back of his neck and drags fingers up over his scalp.

“Should probably shower today,” he says to the darkness around him.

Staring into the glow of his two computer monitors, his pupils are wide to gather the blue-tinged light. On the smaller monitor he has two music editing programs open, as well as a variety of add-ons. Half-finished songs sit, frustrating him, and on the larger monitor is a half finished SAI painting, an animation he can’t get right, a text document full of disjointed, typo-ridden notes to himself including “take a shower fucker.” His browser is a jumble of indistinguishable tabs — video footage of warped VHS tapes, photos of Chernobyl and Aokigahara forest.

He finishes the last lukewarm swallow of Monster and tosses it into the blue plastic bin with the rest of the empty aluminum cans. At least he’s tidy — excluding the messy portfolios, the cables everywhere, the Dreamcast he never puts away but never plays with, that one pair of jeans he never picks up, the ink stains on everything.

When he thinks of himself as tidy, he thinks of pen lines and typography, of notes set in a song and precisely ordered photo collections on his hard drive. There’s order in his neatly kept vinyl collection. There’s order in the sparseness of his closet, his pantry, and his medicine cabinet.

“Huh,” he says, looking at the hour shifting silently to eight. “Maybe I should sleep a bit.”

He strips off his jeans and tumbles onto his low futon bed, pulling a navy blanket and a white sheet over himself. The computer goes into sleep mode and the nightlight of his monitors is extinguished.

The computer itself keeps a steady white pinprick of light and his external terabyte hard drive has a white light that fades in and out like the pulse of a glowing heart.

For a long while he watches those two lights — constant and pulsating — and wonders if sleep is even worth it.

“I could be leveling my Pokémon,” he mumbles against his pillow. But his head and hands feel heavy. The darkness is pressing down on him, turning his body to lead at the bottom of a dark ocean.

He rarely remembers his dreams, but that night he dreams of a jungle deep in the mountains and a black pyramid hidden by trees made thick by their exposed roots. The roots look like headless bodies twisted together in a sexual frenzy. The pyramid hums with an energy like temptation.

When he wakes again, it’s late afternoon and still dark in his room.

He’s sticky with sweat, hard, and, above all, confused.

Once he thought he’d just stopped dreaming, but he’d just stopped remembering. This dream, though, he can’t shake out of the confines of his skull. It just keeps bouncing around, sharp-edged and dangerous.

—-

Subject 4 was introduced to Project Danger in a controlled medium. After twenty-four hours, Subject 4 was safely extracted. After twenty-six hours, Subject 4 terminated. Results inconclusive, but further developments may appear pending autopsy.

—- 

The line of the cursor blinks at him. It might not be so bad if this kind of writing weren’t so dry. Stale coffee wets his mouth, but doesn’t wash the fuzz off his tongue.

When his monitor goes dark suddenly all he can do is swear.

“Fuck.”

He pounds the space bar, checks the ancient, wheezing tower, but it still glows with power. One little light, steady as an eye.

“Fuck this piece of shit,” he says as he smacks the side of the monitor.

Under the glass, the darkness seems to ripple like water.

He stops and takes a long sip of coffee. Something taps at the other side of the glass, or so he imagines, but the sound is clear as a bell. He leans in.

“What the shit is wrong with this thing?” he asks no one.

His nose almost touches the glass, his breath fogging up on it. He’s squinting into the blackness of it, but there’s nothing to see. He misses the sharp points reaching out around his ears. Daggers more than fingers; a cheap imitation of hands. There’s no grip in them so they simply sink into his skull to hold him by the head.

There’s a scream as his head is wrenched back, the wet thud of flesh against glass. The glass rings out, eventually the skull cracks with a surprisingly loud sound. The glass begins to crack and flailing hands smash the keyboard to broken, plastic pieces.

Teeth scatter next to letters and punctuation marks. Blood drips down, pooling around all of them and staining plastic and bone.

In the morning they find the body, decapitated. Bits of hair are sealed to bits of bone and glass with a thick crust of blood. Usually Project Danger leaves less for them to clean up and they believe it is because reaching beyond its enclosure limits its power.

—-

Following autopsies on Subject 5, 6, 7, an energy signature for Project Danger has been identified. Current hypothesis states that integration has been unsuccessful due to unsuitability of selected subjects.

Attached are recordings and graphical interpretations of the energy signature belonging to Project Danger.

Research now shifts toward a more particular selection of test subjects.

—- 

Empty claustrophobic dreams of being trapped in a small space, unable to move or scream or think for the roaring, screaming feedback in his ears. He wakes up paralyzed with the sheets beneath him soaked in sweat.

—-

He’s shaving one morning when the thought strikes him of a world behind the mirror.

His imagination has always been, well, overactive. But this is a difficult paranoia to shake. Even when he’s done shaking water droplets from his razor and setting things away in some kind of order, he turns around just to let his reflection know that he’s watching too.

—-

He’s running from something. It flickers against the walls at times, just out of his sight. These are the halls of his apartment building, the same cracked plaster and linoleum halls, the exact flickering fluorescent lights overhead.

No matter how many corners he turns — his apartment doesn’t even have this many turns and halls — he never loses it. It’s always there a few silent footfalls behind him in the dark.

There’s no sound, only the feeling of menace. He reaches his apartment door, scrambles with the keys. Metal scratches on metal, because his hands are shaking with fear.

His apartment is a jungle, lush and dark and frightening. It’s a silent place, with the wet slap of leaves and the claws of roots and branches out to grab him, but it’s still less terrible then whatever’s chasing him so he runs.

In the distance he sees something.

It’s black and huge and whatever it is, it feels safe.

—-

It feels like someone’s watching him.

—-

The girl is frightened, standing at the edge of open darkness. Very distantly she can hear the roar of rushing water, but it’s far, far away. The air around her is pulling her down and the solemn eyes of everyone are on her.

Willing, she thinks, and her stomach twists with anxiety. The darkness will be cold, she knows, from the breeze that pulls on her flesh and raises the hair on her arms. But the darkness is welcoming her in — welcoming her back, back into the dark night when she was born. There was no moon and she left darkness for more darkness.

It opens itself up to her.

She leaps.

Naked body poised in the air for a second before falling, graceful, feet first, eyes shut tight.

His mouth is a roaring pool of water; his teeth are jagged rocks and cliffs. She is falling and he is waiting for her, feels her tiny body against his tongue and she melts like sugar, but tastes like sex. 

—-

Paranoia and porn go hand in hand, even now that he’s living by himself. He’s pulling up image boards full of shiny, lurid, bouncing things. There’s something hypnotic about animated gifs capturing a moan or an orgasm in an endless loop.

There’s a new edge of paranoia, though, not like someone will call him in the middle of it all, but that someone is staring at him. It’s looking at and judging his choices over his shoulder. He pushes away from the desk, leaving the window minimized and moves under the sheets.

“It’s like I’m fourteen again,” he grumbles to himself.

But he stares up at his ceiling and feels warm. Closing his eyes, it’s all there behind his eyes as he moves his hand fast and frantic.

—-

A murder of crows breaks the thin plastic of biohazard bags with sharp beaks. Fingers are severed from hands and black rot stains unidentifiable hanks of human flesh. Small, hungry heads tear it all apart.

There are rats, waiting at the sidelines and in the shadows of other garbage.

Tiny dark eyes cloud over with milky white blindness. Brown fur goes dark and wet with something alien. Beneath layers of garbage, a body twitches its dead fingers and something black drips from its slack mouth.

A piece of it in everything; devouring is a way of ownership.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Whoever has ears ought to hear these words. Anyone destined for captivity goes into captivity. Anyone destined to be slain by the sword shall be slain by the sword.” Every story has to end. Every world does too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also originally written in April 2011

He dreams that he’s running again. This time he sees that it’s a pyramid, but he doesn’t reach it. Not that night, or the next.

—-

These days he’s been waking up like he’s been soaked in freezing water. He buys a space heater and stocks his cupboard with canned soup, but nothing changes.

The landlady gives him a skeptical look and says, “Haven’t heard that from anyone else.”

He bites the insides of his cheeks so he doesn’t tell her to get fucked.

Beginning his days at two in the afternoon with soup and blankets and the heater as a best friend makes him feel ground down. And no matter what he does, the cold lingers in his toes and fingertips, inside his chest.

—-

Last night he dreamed of eating people again, but not like the first time. He can’t remember their faces, only that they were afraid. At first he was forced. Rough hands held him down and pried his jaw open. But they knew he’d like the taste.

The door was shut behind him and he was left with the bodies, bleeding and heaving and alive.

He was so hungry, in his dream, that he dug into them with bare hands. The bones of his fingers were like chef’s blades, slicing intestines and cutting nicely through muscle. They didn’t scream, but he remembers the salt-taste of tears.

He wakes up aching inside with hunger. There’s ham in the fridge, sealed under clear plastic and looking pink and harmless, but the slap of it and the smell of hot fat and cooking meat turns his stomach suddenly.

Hunched over the toilet, he vomits himself empty and leaves his breakfast to burn.

—-

He goes to the police, because he can’t think of anything else to do. He’s not going crazy, really.

“I think something is following me,” he says. Then he corrects himself.

“Someone, uh, I meant someone.”

He says there’s a Lexus he sees all the time and he doesn’t really, well, feel safe.

There’s paperwork and the whole time he scratches the story out with a borrowed pen he feels eyes on the back of his neck. The guy at the desk looks at him like he’s bored, maybe a bit irritated. Blue eyes seem to be judging his story and finding it flimsy and fake.

He’s scared and there’s nothing — fuck, there’s nothing he can do.

—-

This night he runs for all he’s worth and he doesn’t miss the key and he’s learned the path to take in the silence of the jungle. His hands slap against cold, dark stone. A door opens.

He sees the city beneath him, through an open door, it’s orange smog and bright lights and traffic slipping through streets like blood in veins. But he’s terrified of falling, more terrified of death than he is of the thing behind him. He turns and sees the shadow shape of a man with points of light for eyes. It’s close, right there, and they breathe together.

It presses against his back, tight. They both fall.

He wakes up, but he knows he’ll only dream it again.

And again.

—-

Subject 8 has been located.

—-

He recognizes the car and starts to run.

It’s not late; it’s the middle of the day. There are people out buying groceries and picking their kids up from school. His sneakers pound against the sidewalk.

Big arms and a body tackle him to the ground. His cheek bursts open with blood.

Why did he expect the weight on top of him to be cold?

A needle pierces the skin of his neck and the shadows that have been waiting patiently inside his head take that as their opening.

—-

When he wakes up, it’s in the dark and he’s worried, but he’ll figure things out, he thinks, when his eyes adjust to the light. 

It never happens. It’s dark and then, for a moment, it’s darker. He sits up, realizing that he was lying down. He’s on something soft. He feels out smooth walls. Either plastic or enamel paint, he thinks. Arms out, he feels out the fact that he’s in a corner. Palms reach for the floor to find the cot he’s on is just a few inches above the floor. He shifts to stand up and feel his way around the room when he sees something, or thinks he sees something, out of the corner of his eye. He moves his head and the darkness seems to move with him.

Shadows flicker on the walls of his memories. A shadow watching him through the bathroom mirror and nightmares of suffocating darkness, yes, this is just… just another nightmare.

The darkness opens its bright white eyes.

Franck screams.

—-

“The subject that Project Danger has selected screamed upon introduction,” she scrawls in tight ballpoint script.

“Good sign.”

—-

It doesn’t hurt him. Like the shadows behind his mirror, it only watches.

He’s cold inside, but he turns over on the cot. If he puts his back to it, perhaps he can put it out of his mind.

Dreaming comes.

The sun is a small ball of light, an ember between his fingers. Pressing them together, he puts out the last light of the universe like a candle’s flame between two damp fingertips.

Dreaming ends and he understands, now, that the mass that still sits in the corner staring with pinpricks of light is the source of all his horrors.

Its body shifts the very corners of the room, the very substance of it, until he forgets that there are walls. Brazenly, he gets up and begins to feel out the room, finds a sink, a toilet, a door. The shadow slinks low against the wall, keeping its distance.

“I know what you are,” he tells it.

“I know what you are,” it echoes back in a soft, distorted voice. A taunt.

He remembers his reflection shifting behind the glass.

This goes on. There is food and water, but it never comes when he’s awake. He knows he’s being watched.

A week goes by and he only knows it because suddenly the lights come on. He can feel the way his pupils try to shut themselves. Wincing, he covers his face, but someone grabs him by the wrist.

Their faces are covered.

“Well, he made it a week,” one of them says.

The other grunts, unimpressed.

Shackles are closed around his ankles.

“I won’t run,” he lies. One of them shifts to look at him, face covered by a white face mask and heavy black eye protection. They draw close with needles and a clamp that holds his mouth open. Bright lights in his eyes, vials of blood from the crook of his arm, and a wire pushed back down his throat until he gags.

They talk to each other in clipped half syllables and ignore him.

The inside of his elbow is still bleeding when they drag him back. One ankle hooked to the other by a length of chain, no one bothers to unlock him.

“You’re bleeding,” the voice whispers into his head. Points of light stare at him from the corner.

He says nothing.

Visions of a jungle with gaping caves and waterfalls where dark groundwater has eaten through mountains of black stone fill his head. The dream is warm and living. The air against his skin is freezing cold.

The bruise is gone, but his skin seems light in the dark, luminous. Beneath it, his veins are black and throbbing. Something is in them, inside of him. It squirms.

He presses overgrown fingernails to his skin and bears down. It’s not scratching, it’s tearing and he curses hard to keep himself from feeling it too much.

The darkness watches, indifferent.

They call it Danger; they call him Danger too.

He knows what they’re looking for in the vials of blood and piss they take from his body. One of them holds something up, but the other shakes his head at it. Franck shivers. If he lives, he’s sure he’ll see whatever that was again.

“Danger,” he says to the darkness. “It suits you.”

“You suit me,” it tells him, voice crackling like static.

He shudders.

The tool is for peeling the skin from the inside of his thigh. There’s no warning or anesthetic. Held down at the wrists and ankles by biting metal cuffs, he screams and screams as they neatly strip a square of his flesh off.

“Leave me the fuck alone!” he screams at the darkness. He should have done that long before, not that it would have any impact.

“I can’t,” it says.

Darkness opens up, from a coiled form in the corner with small, bright eyes, to the entire room. It chokes him with cold and the smell of ash. It coalesces in front of him, a simple shadow of his own shape.

“This is going to hurt,” it says.

At least he appreciates the warning.

—-

In his dreams he sees himself.

It’s like looking in a mirror as he brushes his teeth, washes his face, shaves a night’s worth of stubble off his jaw and neck. He matches his reflection’s motions stroke for stroke.

Then his reflection turns and walks away and he remains, mouth pulling into a smirk that drips with cold.

—-

You’ve been watching me?

Yes.

Why? Why me?

—-

They pull him out again and he doesn’t even bother with promises that he won’t run, because if they let him he would. There’s a needle against the softest part of his neck again. But he feels them pressing other needles into the crux of his arm.

When his eyes fall open he can see.

There are screens around him, like huge black eyes that open on the whiteness of his own skin.

“None of them has ever made it this far,” someone is saying.

He sees forms without faces and sharp things that shine in their hands.

“Then let’s keep it that way,” someone else answers. “Don’t fuck up.”

A scalpel bites into the skin of his chest and he thinks he can handle it, but he can’t. Even if he sort of expected this — too many horror movies — it’s too much.

Pain is a red, hot thing that blinds him and fills his ears with static. There’s nothing to look at but the red of his own blood, his own insides splashed across a hundred screens for him to see. He can’t look away because he can’t move. Can’t scream. Can’t blink.

But he can feel everything.

There are tears running cold down his face.

Then, nothing.

He looks down at himself, skin spread open and everything under it looking dark and diseased. There’s black lines streaking his face and the open space of his eyes is filled with two bright lights.

“That’s new,” someone says.

“Fuck, do you think that’s…”

“Maybe?”

“We should pull one of those things out,” someone suggests.

“Do you think it would stay like that?”

There’s silence.

—-

“Thank you,” he says to the thing in the corner.

It looks at him with those bright eyes, the only light in the room.

—-

He dreams of himself again. From a corner he watches himself making art, making music, looking at porn, all with the same shifting glow over his face. He plays with his DS. He pulls his dick out like no one is watching.

That is, of course, an obvious lie.

—-

The night after they pull him out and pry his jaw open to pull a tooth out straight from his jaw, he dreams of someone else.

This person is anonymous, frightened in the darkness.

“This isn’t what you are to me,” it tells him.

Then it tears the man apart and makes him watch. There isn’t even any screaming. It’s all swallowed up.

—-

There are still shadows shifting around the building. She’s tired and latex doesn’t seem to keep the blood off her hands. The hallways are so cold and empty, with fluorescent lights that haven’t seemed stable since they brought that project into the building.

“What a fucked up thing,” she says to no one.

“Weren’t you going to be a doctor?” she asks herself. “You wanted to find cures for diseases! What are you doing? What are you even fucking doing?!”

Her glasses fog up as she cries, hot angry tears. The wall is cold against her back and its almost a relief, because she’s burning up inside with shame and anger.

The shadows creep up behind her and she’s too cold to notice a difference. Tight fingers around her throat are nothing but deep bruises against her skin. There is no sound, only the end of her quiet sobbing. Everything is silence and cold, until the body slumps down with bruises in a collar around its throat so dark they’re black.

—-

Death spreads like a disease touching everyone on the project. One doctor starts coughing up black smoke like a coal miner and is dead the next day. A lab tech testing Subject 8’s bone marrow starts spontaneously bleeding from mysterious sores that won’t clot or close.

The ax comes down in a simple email from corporate and it feels like a betrayal.

“Terminate the project or clean out your desk.”

She could cry and plead with him, but there’d only be hard eyes and a bored look. He’d scratch his beard at her and she’d know there is no other option: end the project or end her career. So she writes her resignation carefully and calls one of the only doctors who hasn’t fallen ill. She knows the only ones left, they still care.

Or at least, she’s hoping they care. Some things are just more important than bureaucracy.

—-

The last dream he has, he is looking up at himself as he shifts. He hears himself say, “I think something is following me.” Hears the bored voice telling him to fill out certain forms.

He sits in his own shadow and watches, knowing just how doomed he’s been this whole time. It’s not acceptance. It’s not resignation. He can’t fight, can’t win, but he can’t not. He’s jostled awake and feels a needle bite his neck. The darkness has long ago settled cold inside his chest, inside his bones, and inside his head.

The room is still dark when he leaves it, but it’s darker behind his eyelids.

“Is this the end?” he asks Danger.

There’s only a hiss of static like laughter.

—-

There’s nothing darker, more suspicious, or stupider than a human being. Especially one that is afraid.

Slipping out from unconscious bones, there’s blood to spill and flesh to tear with these nails and teeth that it now owns. When everyone else is dead, things are still and quiet and Franck is waking up again inside him.

Already he’s fighting back, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

—-

There’s blood in his eyes, blinding him.

He screams himself deaf. Blood wells up in his ears, clogging them from sound. It fills his mouth and bloats his stomach until he heaves it up and out of him. It sticks to his skin, heavy and thick. It’s hot, but it cools too fast and he’s soaked in it.

There were people and sounds, but there’s nothing now, just the feeling of blood on his skin and in his eyes. Everything tastes like copper until nothing tastes like anything at all.

He might as well be dead.

He thinks he might be when suddenly no one is holding him down, nothing is fighting back, and he bursts out of whatever cage he’s in like a wild, free thing. For a moment he has wings and he’s flying, but he feels asphalt with his palms, his knees, the side of his face.

There is no pain.

Stumbling blind and deaf, the sky becomes the ground the asphalt under his feet becomes air. He hits a metal guardrail with his thighs, follows it until the metal peels open like a flower under his hands.

The ground disappears under his feet and everything is the black, blind sky of blood for a moment.

There’s no air in his lungs and the only thought is that he’s falling. Then he hits dirt and rolls. Rocks try to catch him, hard hands against his ribs and his shin. He hits his head when he stops, reaches out and feels warm metal and the dirt-crusted grooves of tire tread. There’s blood and grit under his fingernails.

He pulls himself upright on the curved metal of the wheel well, hands sliding over smooth paint and hot metal. The jagged edge of a smashed hood is a shock, a broken thing, and he slices his palm on it. He can feel the metal bite into him, digging into the skin of his hands.

But it doesn’t hurt.

He’s bleeding, he can feel it. He’s cold and the life is dripping out of his eyes, over his lips, and out of his palms.

He’s not dead yet, but he’s fairly certain he will be soon.

Did he cause this? The twisted guardrail, this smashed up car at the bottom of a sharp drop.

He smears blood across the hood, up until he hits the bent edge of it, the strange metal of wipers and the spider-web cracks in the windshield. Those suck up his blood, he can feel them drawing something out of him. They’re rough, but geometrically under his palms.

“Sorry,” he croaks through a throat that feels like it’s been scrubbed raw and pissed down.

Is he crying, or is that just more blood?

It doesn’t matter; he can’t stay here.

He makes it out, blinded, into whatever lays out ahead of him. He steps and the ground disappears, he moves his arms and things like branches and tree trunks and leaves suddenly appear in his grasp.

Blood loss takes him, turning blind-deafness into unconsciousness, but he dreams of running through the darkness with nothing but the sound of his own wet breathing and the pounding of his heart.

He’s being chased, but he can’t see and he can’t hear — he only knows because he feels it.

—- 

The dirt and his blood mix, everything is black. There’s ink under his fingers and in his hair. A stain. A lesion that opens then scabs and blisters and opens again. Running, running, tripping, picking himself up, scrapes on palms, running.

Panting breath makes cold clouds in the darkness. White against the black. Eyes, bright and looming.

One moment under his skin and he needs to scratch it out with fingers like claws and teeth like needles. Then, there, in the shadows, waiting for him to run again and give chase.

A game for two. He never wins.

Claws pierce his heart with cold, but he doesn’t die. He isn’t allowed. There’s so much death around him in the quiet of the forest and he sees the bodies of the people who have died for trying to hurt him out of the corner of his eye, under the fold of leaves and vines.

Darkness. Light. Danger.

How long has it been? Hands against his bones, warm and he flinches. Warm and soft is alien to him. Why does he expect the weight on top of him to be cold?

“Who are you?”

What a question. There is no who anymore. There is no I. There are two of them and they are not human. Have they ever been?

Who am I? Who am I?


End file.
